Agenda
August 29, 2011
Annual General Meeting of
THE POETRY SOCIETY (INCORPORATED)
Company Registration Number: 190736
Charity Registration Number: 303334
St Giles-in-the-Field, St Giles High Street, London, WC2H 8LG
at 6.30pm, Wednesday 14 September 2011
Agenda
Doors open 6.30pm. Access is via presentation of your Poetry Society membership card. Voting papers to elect new Board members will be handed to you on arrival and should be completed and handed in by 7pm
Refreshments will be provided.
- 7pm: voting scheduled to close. Please note that the voting period may be extended by discretion at the meeting if necessary. Votes will be counted while the meeting proceeds.
- Apologies for absence
- Approval of the Minutes of the Annual General Meeting held on 24 November 2010
- Report of the Board
- Report on preparation of the Financial Statements of the Society for the year ended 31 March 2011, which are complete but remain unapproved and unaudited as they are subject to Auditor confirmations of future ACE funding.
- Report from the Director
- Poetry performances
- Declaration of results. New Board announced.
Getting there: The church is located in the heart of the West End, close to Tottenham Court Road tube station – PLEASE NOTE THAT ONLY THE CENTRAL LINE CURRENTLY STOPS AT TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD. Take exit 5 to Charing Cross Road and then turn left into Denmark Street. The church is just south of the Centre Point building.
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Poetry Society members 
Good Morning!
After last night’s Annual General Meeting during which Michael George Gibson spoke about the purposes of the Poetry Society, I hereby post the transcript of his speech and invite comments here or at my email address dorli@btinternet.com
A statement prepared for the Annual General Meeting
of The Poetry Society, September 14th 2011
Chair, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Only two of the Candidate Statements here bear with any directness on the issues that have caused what another of the candidates has called a ‘melt-down’ or make any suggestion that there may be fundamental constitutional matters to be addressed.
If, as reports lead us to believe, there has been a dispute between – to put it simply – some who think that the Society’s funds should be principally used to support ‘educational’ activities and others who consider that most support should be given to ‘poets writing today’, then it may be suggested that there is an underlying and fundamental constitutional matter that should be now addressed, indeed that of the very purpose of the Society.
The purposes of this Society were originally stated thus:
The Objects of the Charity are to advance public education in the study and use of poetry.
These Objects were reaffirmed in the new Memorandum and Articles of the Association in 2004. At the Annual General Meeting of that year I intervened to point out that in the Trustees’ Report of that year it was stated:
The Society exists to promote contemporary poetry and poets in Britain.
I expressed anxiety concerning the dissonance between the two statements. The Minutes of that meeting state as follows:
This was noted by the meeting. As the Trustees’’ Report is produced annually it was agreed to modify it next year to state the Society’s constitutional object statement rather than our ‘motto’ of ‘helping poets and poetry to thrive in Britain today.’
And yet in 2011 we have all entered this meeting only on display of our Membership Cards on which it states:
THE POETRY SOCIETY
Helping poets and poetry thrive in Britain today
I suggest that this Society, some of whose managing and governing Officers have in recent years proved to be at the least untrustworthy and incompetent, but perhaps even duplicitous and fraudulent, re-examine its fundamental objectives and what they should now properly and honestly mean in practice; because otherwise this somewhat absurd Society of which I happily remain an interested member will build for itself another castle of sand in cloud-cuckoo-land, where a bully in braces will kick sand in our faces.
Michael George Gibson
14th September 2011
22 Middle Walk,
Knutsford,
Cheshire WA14 8EW
info@michaelgeorgegibson.org